I was stuck at Laguardia yesterday and had the opportunity to stare at the flight information display at the Delta gate. The monitors show a rotating array of information, including:
- Arrival time and origin of the next flight to that gate
- Departure time of the next flight from the gate
- Estimated flight time and expected time of arrival
- U.S. radar, so you can see all the thunderstorms that will interfere with your trip
- Weather forecast for the destination
- Number of seats assigned/unassigned
- Standby list in priority order (names shortened for privacy)
- First-class standby list in priority order (names shortened for privacy)
- Reason for the current delay
The screens even tell you where the bathroom and Crown Room Club are (none in the Delta Shuttle terminal). The standby list even gives you their priority system, so you know who can bump you down the list.
Every routine question I used to stand in line for is answered by the display. It’s a simple thing that makes life simples for both the airline and the passenger.
I’ll be at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose next week.
If you’d like to meet up, please send me an email:
Apologies for the bad design in making you type out the email address.
As I’ve been traveling more lately, I’ve been making greater use of wireless search tools. Google’s Mobile Web search (currently in beta) is a welcome departure from other mobile search tools.
Instead of searching all of the Web, Mobile Web only searches sites optimized for wireless devices.
This fits perfectly with my needs when I’m on my cell phone. I’m more likely to be looking for movie showtimes, flight status, stock quotes and other discrete chunks of information. I’m certainly not looking to read long news stories or navigating through Web sites with giant images.
You can test the site on a Web browser at http://www.google.com/xhtml. An FAQ is also also available.
The mobile site includes some of Google’s onebox shortcuts:
- A ticker symbol and you’ll get stock information above the results
- “Movie showtimes 90210″ will get you a list of movies playing in the area
- “Washington nationals” will show status of games in action
- “Pizza 90210″will show pizza places in the area
- “clerks ii” provides running time, rating, genre and review stars, with a box to enter a ZIP code for showtimes
The mobile site is also incorporating mobile-specific ads:
- “united” triggered an ad for ua2go.com, United Airlines’ mobile site.
- “delta”, “us airways” and “new york hotels” triggered an ad for Expedia, with a link to a phone number. The phone number (800-390-8994), doesn’t match any search results, so this could be a test of pay per call advertising.
- “dl” and “screensavers” triggered an ad for EA Mobile Games.
- “ringtones” triggered an ad for Jamster.com
(These ads did not appear when I accessed the above URL from a Web browser.)
Last night, the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert’s satire of Bill O’Reilly, aired a hilarious segment about Wikipedia and what Colbert termed “Wikiality”. It was so funny, I wanted to share it with some friends.
I went to Comedy Central’s Web site and searched for Wikiality. No dice. Not even an error message indicating no results found. I navigated through the horrendously designed Web site to find videos and ended up on a page called “Mother Load”. Immediately, I got a pop-up blocker alert. When I got through that and tried view videos, I was prompted to download an ActiveX plugin for Firefox. Not wanting to destroy the reason I use Firefox (security), I switched to IE. In IE, I found that the video wasn’t available. This was around 1 p.m. on Tuesday, about 13 hours after the show aired.
Contrast this with my experience on YouTube. I went to the front page, typed “wikiality” in the search box and the first result was the Wikiality clip. No popups, no installs, just direct access to the content I was looking for.
As of about 10:30p.m. on Tuesday (about 23 hours after the show aired), the video had logged 65,380 views. Judging from the the timestamps on the comments, the video was posted within 2 hours of the first airing.
Although the video is now available on Comedy Central’s site, you’ll have to disable your pop-up blocker and, if you use Firefox, install the ActiveX plugin. You can’t search for it from the main page. Unlike with YouTube, you can’t comment on it. And you can’t embed the video in a blog.
